Immanuel Kant’s ethics are the most common modern example of deontological ethics. (Deontological ethics are rule-based ethics; for more on types of ethics, see last week’s post) Rather than starting with a specifically Kantian view, I want to use the lens of one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, Alenka Zupančič, as expressed in her book Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. Zupančič looks at Kant through the lenses of Freud and Lacan to create a new view of ethics.
To start, let’s look at what Kant brought to ethics.
Kantian Ethics and Duty
Before Kant, Ethics was about restraining desire. Kant made it about cultivating a different desire, which he called duty.
Traditional ethics – from Aristotle to Bentham – remained on this side of desire (‘The morality of power, of the service of goods, is as follows: “As far as desires are concerned, come back later. Make them wait”.’)8 Kant was the one who introduced the dimension of desire into ethics, and brought it to its ‘pure state’. This step, crucial as it was, nevertheless needs another ‘supplementary’ step, which Kant – at least according to Lacan – did not take: the step that leads beyond desire and its logic, into the realm of the drive. Hence, ‘after the mapping of the subject in relation to the a [the object of desire], the experience of the fundamental fantasy becomes the drive’. 1
In Kant’s view, any other act driven by the desire for pleasure or pain (including intellectual pleasure/pain) was considered pathological. Only actions based purely on duty are considered ethical. From this perspective, most of our actions are pathological.
[T]he notion of the ‘pathological’ has the status in Kant’s practical philosophy of a kind of conceptual knot, linking numerous divergent theoretical strands. Kant uses this term to designate that which does not belong to the order of the ethical. We should stress, however, that this notion of the pathological must not be considered the opposite of the ‘normal’. On the contrary, in Kant’s view, it is our ‘normal’, everyday actions that are more or less always pathological. We act pathologically when there is something driving our actions – serving either to propel us forward or to impel us from behind. (7)
The alternative to acting pathologically is acting ethically. Acting ethically is based on acting out of a sense of duty as determined by will and reason. The core of acting ethically is pure motivation, which he describes as “will”. Kant does not see this as a gradual change a person can make. You can’t gradually improve your motives from pathological to ethical. You can’t incrementally improve the will, but rather, it requires a “‘paradigm shift’… to move from the pathological to the ethical.” (10)
Kant uses the Categorical Imperative to describe what it means to act according to duty. In his work, he has many phrasings of these (which he asserts all lead to the same result), but we will only look at the most common:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. (92)
It can be easy to imagine how this may help guide ethical behavior, but it is rather complex in practice.
And, for Kant, it isn’t enough to follow this rule; one must feel a sense of duty and act only for the sake of duty.
Ethics demands not only that an action conform with duty, but also that this conformity be the only ‘content’ or ‘motive’ of that action. Thus Kant’s emphasis on form is in fact an attempt to disclose a possible drive for ethical action. Kant is saying that ‘form’ has to come to occupy the position formerly occupied by ‘matter’, that form itself has to function as a drive. Form itself must be appropriated as a material surplus, in order for it to be capable of determining the will. Kant’s point, I repeat, is not that all traces of materiality have to be purged from the determining ground of the moral will but, rather, that the form of the moral law has itself to become ‘material’, in order for it to function as a motive force of action. (14)
This brings us to a paradox that Zupančič sees in Kan’t position. The need for duty, something which is not pathological and has nothing to do with pleasure or pain, to become a drive.
’how can the pure form of duty itself function as a pathological element, that is, as an element capable of assuming the role of the driving force or incentive of our actions?’. If the latter were actually to take place – if the ‘pure form of duty’ were actually to operate as a motive (incentive or drive) for the subject – we would no longer need to worry about the problems of the ‘purification of the will’ and the elimination of all pathological motives. (15)
If this is the case, then acting ethically is about having a sort of drive and not virtue, effort, and sacrifice.
The need that Kant has for an act to be about duty and only about duty comes off as an excess demand. Kupančič links this to the idea from Lacan of surplus enjoyment, also known as objet petit a. Objet petit a is the cause of desire; this is not the desired object, but that empty space that we hope our desires will fill and never do.
Object petit a is an absence that causes drive, and so, too, is Kant’s ethics. For Kant, the lack of any drive must function as the drive for a genuinely ethical act.
Thus we can see that the object-drive involved in Kant’s conceptualization of ethics is not just like any other pathological motivation, but neither is it simply the absence of all motives or incentives. The point, rather, is that this very absence must at a certain point begin to function as an incentive. It must attain a certain ‘material weight’ and ‘positivity’, otherwise it will never be capable of exerting any influence whatsoever on human conduct. (18)
Thus, for this view of Kant, the sense of duty must be a driving force, but one completely separate from any pleasure or pain avoidance, whether physical or mental/intellectual.
Kantian Freedom
To act ethically, there is a requirement for some degree of freedom. To be able to choose to act ethically requires that it be a choice. I have touched on freedom in 2 previous newsletters hereand here, but we will look at how Zupančič approaches the subject (through Kant) here.
Kant does not try simply to encourage us to act according to our ‘deepest convictions’, as does the contemporary ideology advocating that we heed our ‘authentic inclinations’ and rediscover our ‘true selves’. Instead, the procedure of the Critique is based on Kant’s recognition of the fact that our inclinations and our deepest convictions are radically pathological: that they belong to the domain of heteronomy.
The defining feature of a free act, on the contrary, is precisely that it is entirely foreign to the subject’s inclinations. (23)
For Kant, pathological actions are not free. They are always driven by some inclination, whether external or internal. We often think we are free because we decide our actions, but this internal inclination prevents us from acting freely. This idea that you decide your actions is referred to as psychological freedom.
‘Psychological freedom’ (Kant’s term) cannot be a solution to the problem of the possibility of freedom, since it is just another name for determinism. If one tries to found freedom on the fact that the causes of a subject’s actions are internal – that representations, desires, aspirations and inclinations function as causes – one will never find anything resembling freedom. Instead, one will find that freedom itself is reduced back to psychological causality – the necessary connection of psychological phenomena in time. (23-24)
Freedom, therefore, must lie somehow outside the subject. Zupančič says the answer is guilt.
As a first approximation, we might say that guilt is the way in which the subject originally participates in freedom, and it is precisely at this point that we encounter the division or split which is constitutive of the ethical subject, the division expressed in ‘I couldn’t have done anything else, but still, I am guilty.’ Freedom manifests itself in this split of the subject. The crucial point here is that freedom is not incompatible with the fact that ‘I couldn’t do anything else’, and that I was ‘carried along by the stream of natural necessity’. Paradoxically, it is at the very moment when the subject is conscious of being carried along by the stream of natural necessity that she also becomes aware of her freedom. (27)
The logic here is complex, but when we feel like we could not have acted otherwise, guilt comes up. Guilt acts as a paradoxical reminder that there is choice and freedom. The following passage can help clarify this:
On the one hand, Kant seems persistent in his attempt to persuade us that none of our actions is really free; that we can never establish with certainty the nonexistence of pathological motives affecting our actions; that so-called ‘inner’ or ‘psychological’ motives are really just another form of (natural) causality. On the other hand, he never tires of stressing, with equal persistence, that we are responsible for all our actions, that there is no excuse for our immoral acts; that we cannot appeal to any kind of ‘necessity’ as a way of justifying such actions – in brief, that we always act as free subjects. (27)
And so we have this paradox: we are always driven by something and thus cannot be free, yet we are responsible for our actions. This is what guilt reminds us: even when we are not free, we are responsible.
In other words, where the subject believes herself to be free (i.e. on the level of ‘psychological causality’), Kant insists upon the irreducibility of the pathological. He insists that it is possible to find, for each and every one of our ‘spontaneous’ actions, causes and motives which link it to the law of natural causality. Let us call this line of argumentation the ‘postulate of de-psychologizing’ or the ‘postulate of determinism’.
However, when the subject has already been detached from all psychology – that is, when the latter is revealed to be just another type of causality, and the subject appears to be nothing but an automaton – Kant says to this subject: and yet it is precisely in this situation that you are freer than you know. (28)
So how is this possible? How can we both be unfree and free?
What Kant is saying is that there is no Cause of the cause; this is precisely what allows for the subject’s autonomy and freedom. That is why the subject can be guilty (i.e. free to have acted otherwise) even though her actions are thoroughly determined by causal laws. (27)
Essentially, there are always causes of our actions, but as you move up the causal chain, there is no beginning; there is no cause you can point to as the cause of the cause.
So, are we really free to act? Can we point to the freedom? No, but yet we believe it to be there, and that belief is, in part, what enables us to see our actions as free. That is what makes us subjects:
the definitive experience of the subject of freedom, the subject who believes herself to be free, is that of a lack of freedom. The subject is presumed to be free, yet she cannot disclose this freedom in any positive way, cannot point to it by saying: ‘This act of mine was free; this precise moment I was acting freely.’ Instead, the more she tries to specify the precise moment at which freedom is real, the more it eludes her, ceding its place to (causal) determination, to the pathological motives which were perhaps hidden from view at first glance. (31)
To see yourself as free, you paradoxically need to encounter yourself as determined. It is only then that you can choose to be free.
The subject cannot choose herself as divided subject without having first experienced her own radical pathology. In other words, the subject cannot choose herself as a (free) subject without first journeying through the territory constituted by the postulate of determinism, or the postulate of ‘de-psychologizing’, which supposes the existence of a coherent and ‘closed’ chain of causes of the subject’s actions that completely exhausts their motives and significance. (31)
And so, where is the role of freedom in this? The maxims we freely choose and our choices are the causes of later actions.
it may well be that you were dragged along by the torrent of (natural) necessity, but in the final analysis it was you that made this cause the cause. There is no cause of the cause of your action; the cause of the cause can only be the subject itself. (31)
Now, that drive is likely unconscious. Zupančič uses the example of someone’s fetish:
We must attribute to the subject the decision involved in the incorporation of this drive or incentive into her maxim, even though this decision is neither experiential nor temporal – just as a fetishist, if we pursue this comparison further, would never say: ‘On this very day I decided that high-heeled shoes would be the ultimate objects, the drives of my desire.’ Instead, he would say: ‘I can’t help myself’, ‘It’s not my fault’, ‘It’s beyond my control’, ‘I can’t resist it’.…
The decision in question is, of course, to be situated on the level of the unconscious or, in Kantian terms, on the level of Gesinnung, the ‘disposition’ of the subject which is, according to Kant, the ultimate foundation of the incorporation of incentives into maxims. (35)
Thus, we can uncover our freedom by exploring and understanding our unconscious drives, the forces that make us make the decisions we do. This returns us to the Kant quote provided above:
But if a man is to become not merely legally, but morally, a good man…, this cannot be brought about through gradual reformation so long as the basis of the maxims remains impure, but must be effected through a revolution in the man’s disposition.… He can become a new man only by a kind of rebirth, as it were [through] a new creation.(11)
We must reinvent ourselves to be ethical because it is only by choosing our unconscious drives that we become free to act. And therefore act ethically. This is not a conscious choice, or put another way; it is a choice from an empty place. The choice of freedom is a forced choice.
The starting point… is a ‘forced choice’, since the subject can choose only freedom, the alternative choice being ruled out by the fact that it would be the choice of non-being or nonexistence. (40)
To be free, you must make the forced choice to believe you are free.
[H]ow is it possible to understand the fact that the driving force, the incentive of the ethical, is at the same time its result; how is it possible that freedom stands as the condition of freedom, and autonomy as the condition of autonomy? This circular movement is essentially linked to the status and character of the subject. There can be no freedom without a subject, yet the very emergence of the subject is already the result of a free act. The ‘circular’ logic of practical reason is to be accounted for with reference to the structure of subjectivity. (41)
Kant in Practice
Before we conclude, let’s look at an example of Kantian ethics (through this lens).
Kant believes in the unconditional nature of duty. The most famous example is that it is not ok to lie ever, even if a killer is hunting for your friend who is in your house. If the killer asks if your friend is inside your house, you must say yes. He argues that if we make the case that it is ok to lie, it would mean living by the universal rule that lying to deceive is acceptable. As a result, the value of truth is diminished and therefore becomes meaningless. It is impossible to trust anyone in a world where lying is permissible.
Many neo-Kantians have argued that Kantian ethics does not require that you tell a truth that would lead to someone’s death (for example, the maxim on lying could be formulated in other ways, that lying is only acceptable to prevent harm). Still, it provides a stark example of what following the categorical imperative can look like in practice. It also shows how what is ethical may require a significant shift in how you see duty and responsibility. It also shows that what matters is the act itself and whether the intentions of that act are good.
For a business example, we could ask if layoffs are ethical; the answer would depend on the motivation. If the goal is to boost the stock price or improve the profit margin, then the maxim would likely be that “whenever a company wants to improve its financial position, it can lay people off.” This is something that most people would not accept as a moral law.
However, suppose the intention was to save as many jobs as possible and prevent the company from leaving. In that case, the maxim may be, “If a company is struggling, they may lay off employees as a last resort to prevent everyone from losing their jobs.” This seems to be far better.
It should also be evident that some judgment determines whether a universal law is good or bad. We will touch on that challenge in the next week’s newsletter.
Kantian Ethics for Middle Managers
As a middle manager, there are things you may be told that you are asked not to share with your team.
You may feel that lying is a way to avoid the challenge. However, if you universalize the idea that lying to avoid difficult conversations is ok, that is likely to be a bad outcome and lead to a lack of trust from the team.
If your choice to act was based on achieving performance objectives or looking good to one’s superiors, Kant would consider that pathological.
To act in these situations based on a sense of duty and only duty (both to the company and the employee) may require that you refuse to answer specific questions, saying that you have been asked not to share any information about it.
Using the categorical imperative is a valuable test to see if an action is ethical. In this case the maxim, “when asked to share information that you don’t have information to share you will say that you have been asked not to share and will not” is something that most people would agree is ethical as it preserves their own privacy as well.
The next two weeks will continue this look at Zupančič’s Ethics of the Real and how that moves beyond the Kantian position.
- Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p. 4) – Future page numbers will appear in parentheses. ↩